I’m beginning to wonder how can I honestly continue to claim that following a moral path has its own rewards and that the ends do not justify the means when the successful almost invariably tend to succeed on their loose morals – they believe that it’s ok to deceive, cheat, subvert, or even outright steal so long as they aren’t caught. When they’re caught, they then bemoan their fate, not because they were doing something wrong, but because they believe they were not clever enough to avoid capture. To state it bluntly, they have no independent moral system in place; it is tied up completely within society’s reaction to their behavior. Because they imagine that their behavior is common and because they have not been caught for all of it, they still believe themselves good people.

I know that Machiavelli observed that this is the route to power, but one of my great quests in life has been searching for ways to obtain success without compromising moral integrity – in essence, to know what Machiavelli said, but to either reconcile his advice with my morals or distance myself from it entirely. I’ve been doing it for 11 years now and I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer.

I know for a fact that my adherence to integrity limits me, but I will not deviate from my personal values for the sake of a society that will not accept them. Regardless of the rejection I’ve found (and the inevitable future rejection I will find) because I refuse to press myself into the molds people expect me to fill, I do not regret this decision any longer. No rejection can compare to what happened to me two years ago, when I was summarily shut out from my desired field and barred from what I then saw as the meaning of my life because I was very much unlike a traditional graduate student (actually, I’d argue that the difference makes me more effective, since typical graduate students have not impressed me, though on the other hand, I’ll never have anyone to exchange complex ideas with and must consequently operate in isolation), and by this time I’ve transcended that rejection sufficiently to realize that if I discard the intrinsic suffering of rejection, no further consequent suffering will touch me. I merely grieve for society itself, that it elevates such people to power!